at present

The subtitle of my Chinese textbook reads: The most popular Chinese textbook for foreigners all over the world at present.

Not very optimistic, if you ask me.

Neither is my outlook for learning Chinese.  This language is hard.  Super hard.  If there was an alphabet, I'd have a fighting chance.  I feel that there is nothing for me to hang my hat on with Chinese.  The sounds, the tones, the characters -- it doesn't resemble English in any way.  When attempting to translate characters, I'll say to myself "It's the one with the squiggly lines."  Then I'll flip through my book, looking for the right character, only to think: they ALL have squiggly lines.  And writing the characters is hopeless.  I told my teacher to forget about it for now because I can't do it.  She said okay, we'll let it go until chapter ten.  Fortunately for me, I think we're a long way off from chapter ten.  We've been stuck on chapter four for several weeks.  Today, we finally began chapter five.

My teacher is lovely.  She lives one floor up from us and she teaches and does translation for a living.  She's young and creative, fluent in English and comes highly recommended (she tutors Chris's upper school principal's daughter).  She helped us find our apartment and did all the translating of the negotiations.  That first day she invited me to her apartment on Sundays for yoga and I've been going each week. 

I'm alright at translating from pinyin to English and vice versa but it's a futile exercise.  Writing in pinyin is not a very useful skill.  And pinyin doesn't quite translate to the correct pronunciation in English.  So you have to learn the correct way to make sounds in this made-up way of writing (pinyin).

I'm always surprised when Chinese people speak to me in Chinese and continue talking to me after I shake my head and speak in English.  They always seem surprised that I don't speak Chinese.  I think it would be more surprising if I opened up my mouth and spoke fluent Chinese.  I was complaining to Chris about this the other night -- that people are always speaking to me in Chinese and he said "Well, what language do you expect them to talk to you in?"  I don't know.  I guess I would just prefer that we pantomime.  Which I'm getting quite good at.  Case in point: mimicking mopping the floor and pointing to the myriad of mysterious cleaners will lead to a saleswoman finding the floor cleaner for you.

Today I said my first successful sentence to a woman who approached me and Dag on the street.  I shook my head and walked off and she come up again, saying something I couldn't understand.  I replied "wǒ bù zhī dao" which means "I don't know."  She nodded and walked away.

So, perhaps it's not hopeless.  But at present, I'm really struggling with learning Chinese.